Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

The public sector
in the public sector’s functions. (We will look at this issue more closely in the next
section.)
As we have noted, the vast majority of public sector employees are engaged in
direct service delivery, particularly through the education, health and police/justice
sectors. This reflects the public’s continuing expectation that ‘the service state’ will
provide a range of services directly, as one component in a ‘hybrid mixture of part
public, part private activities, delivery chains that do not remain in neat boxes or
organisational settings’. 19
An overview of recent public sector changes
Developments in how the public sector works reflect the way Australians and
their elected representatives decide the following questions, and how those answers
change over time:
• What are most efficient, effective, equitable and sustainable ways for governments
to design and deliver services and programs that respond to the needs
and wants of their citizens, businesses and communities?
• How should that response involve the private and not-for-profit sectors, and
citizens themselves?
The ‘traditional’ public sector was arguably the dominant model for the public sector
in Australia and New Zealand to the end of the 1980s. This model was characterised
by a number of features derived from the Westminster tradition, including:
• a politically neutral public service controlled by and accountable to ministers
• government departments that directly provide services, with little outsourcing
and competition, integrating policy and operational functions, from the design
of policies through to their implementation and delivery ‘at street level’
• in order to perform these functions effectively and efficiently, departments
organised in standardised managerial hierarchies in which power and authority
are increasingly invested in correspondingly smaller echelons of senior officials
(as distinct, say, from markets and networks) 20
• departments largely designed to implement political directions in discrete,
manageable and repetitive tasks, conducted according to prescribed rules and
technical expertise. 21
However, during the 1970s and 1980s, governments were increasingly faced with
economic globalisation, demographic pressures, the role of supranational economic
and political institutions and concerns about the size and cost of their public
19 Wanna, Butcher and Freyens 2010, 31.
20 Osborne 2010, 8.
21 Stoker 2006, 45.
131